The creative genius of 3D printing

Jeweller Cinnamon Lee’s wedding rings are produced on a 3D printer using a seamless mesh of titanium wire less than 0.3 millimetres in diameter.
Photo: Louise Kennerley

by
Sally Rose

You’ve decided to take the plunge and get married and top of your shopping list are wedding rings. What if a 3D printer made those rings?

Not “made" in the sense that the rings would be designed on such a printer, but produced, as in the printer spits out a real ring ready for you to slip on your finger.

A bit too futuristic? It’s already happening in Wollongong, the coastal town that lies about an hour-and-a-half south of Sydney, and is better known as being a hub for ­Australia’s steel manufacturing than a hotbed of avant-garde design and technology.

But there in the University of Wollongong an unlikely collaboration occurred between jewellery designer
Cinnamon Lee
and ­scientist
Stephen Beirne
.

Lee was an early adopter of 3D printing technology. She first encountered it as a ­student at the Australian National University Art School in the late 1990s. But it’s the latest generation of 3D printers, which ­produce finished products out of metal, that really caught her imagination.

She wanted to create jewellery that exploited the full potential of these machines, and which would eventually produce a collection of titanium rings.

As a jeweller, Lee had always been constrained by the need to design rings out of metal that was thick enough not to break. Printing with titanium was a chance to create something radically fine.

The rings that Lee produced on the 3D printer in Wollongong were formed from a seamless mesh of wire less than 0.3 millimetres in diameter.

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“As a traditionally trained gold and silversmith I have no interest in using technology as a way to save time or money," says Lee.

“The beauty is when it can make the previously impossible, possible. I’ve always just thought of digital technologies in the same way as a saw or hammer, as tools that must be mastered before they can wield the best possible results," she says.

Rings, hearts and flutes

Lee’s curiosity about the 3D printers led her to the Beirne, who is the additive fabrication manager at the Australian National Fabrication Facility, which is housed within the University of Wollongong.

Beirne has been leading research projects such as the development of a printed flute using the $1 million-plus ­titanium printer.

The facility also partners with local industry. Most of the clients using the printer are in the biomedical research field, working on next-generation heart implants, prosthetic joints and dental fillings.

“Medical device companies like Cochlear use 3D printers to make prototypes all the time," says Mark Armstrong, the director of consultancy Blue Sky Design Group, whose clients include Cochlear. “But the resolution and quality of finishes is not good enough to produce end-products yet."

But most believe it’s only a matter of time.

The technology Lee has accessed in Wollongong is quite different from most 3D printers, which extrude malleable materials such as wax or plastic.

In the titanium 3D printing process, computer-guided lasers fuse the desired structure from a pile of finely powdered metal – building up the structure layer by layer in cross-sections. When the printing process is complete, the excess metal powder is blasted away like dust, revealing the negative spaces in the design.

Expensive and time-consuming, its ­applications are niche. The manufacturing method is most beneficial for items that need to be exceptionally small, light, strong and delicate, or include many moving parts.

“Helping an artist express her creativity has made us stretch the limits of what we can do with the machine, and that has expanded the horizons of what services we can offer our other partners," says Beirne.

Lee’s latest collection of rings exhibits a degree of technical difficulty that Beirne previously thought was impossible, even using the technology he oversees. It could not be done by hand or using any other method of manufacturing.

One of the rings Lee designed to exploit the capabilities of the titanium printer adorns the finger with a fine multi-dimensional frame shaped in the outline of the contours of dozens of brilliant cut diamonds. Inspiration for the design of the ring, which retails at $2200, came from ­subverting the classic engagement ring element.

“That design would have been laughed at till now, and when I first saw it I wasn’t sure we could do it either," Beirne says.

Lee is one of many designers participating in the 18th Sydney Design Festival that begins on Saturday.

This year’s festival theme is Design Futures, and creative developments in 3D printing feature more prominently than ever before.

The festival, led by the Powerhouse Museum, has more than 50 creative spaces across Sydney. “Advancements in 3D printing are challenging traditional methods of design and consumption," says Janson Hews, Powerhouse Museum contemporary programs manager.

Breville champions the 3D prototype

The use of 3D printing plays an important role at Breville, a listed company which makes household consumer goods such as blenders and kettles. In-house 3D printing has been an integral part of its design process for more than a decade.

“Prototype early and prototype often is my motto," says Breville design manager Gerard White. “It allows you to work through problems early in the process and ­drastically compresses the time it takes to perfect a design.

“At the end of a day designing something we can put it in the printer and be holding a prototype in our hands in the morning. If I’m not sure what version of a design is going to look better in reality, I’ll print up samples of two or three," he says.

The first 3D printers were released in the 1980s, so the basic technology is far from new. But recent developments in quality and affordability mean its influence on mainstream design practices is growing. Even start-ups can afford a basic model. Audiofly, a Perth-based company that is designing headphones, outlaid about $2000 two years ago for a basic 3D printer when it was in the early stage of developing its first product line.

“The ability to do so much more trial and error in three dimensions has not only sped up the design process but helped us take it to another level of innovation," says Matt Rowett, Audiofly product designer.

Making models is part of everyday life at Breville and Audiofly, but a raft of ­external suppliers have sprung up for less regular users.

WH Williams, a sheet metal fabricator on the outskirts of Sydney, ­established a new division providing 3D printing ­services in a range of materials. Clients include the CSIRO’s Astronomy and Space Science unit.

But while local industry has embraced rapid prototyping technology, the interest in using manufacturing printers to produce finished products is still very much in its infancy. “At the moment there is nowhere near enough demand from industry for 3D metal printing to invest in one of the machines. Australia is at least five years behind the rest of the world," says Wojciech Wawrzyniak, WH Williams’s 3D general manager.

Every industrial engineer and designer in the world is taught they must design according to rules of manufacture. But advancements in 3D metal printing is expanding the rules of what is structurally possible.

Fledgling commercial interest in the technology is poised to grow when there is sufficient demand to realise designs that can’t be produced any other way. And that can only come about when more engineers discover they can think like an artist.